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Faulting a Plan to Replace the Scorned Tappan Zee

The state hopes to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge, but criticism has been raised about a plan’s financing, environmental impact and lack of mass transit.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

TARRYTOWN, N.Y. — It was unloved from the start, built on the cheap, located improbably at the broadest stretch of the Hudson River, its improvised design derided by its own engineers as “one of the ugliest bridges in the East.”

Almost everything about the Tappan Zee Bridge has been criticized since it opened in 1955 — its congestion, its safety, its narrow lanes, substandard design and unfortunate history of suicides — though Gov. Thomas E. Dewey did defend its location on the grounds that it was outside the range of an atomic bomb falling on New York City and thus the only bridge likely to survive an attack.

Now, after more than a decade of delay and inaction, the state seems on the verge of building a new and significantly upgraded Tappan Zee, a project that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other proponents said would produce tens of thousands of construction jobs, improve commutes for frustrated drivers and replace the George Costanza of New York bridges with a successor twice its size in one of the largest construction projects in state history.

Alas, the bridge may end up better, but there has been no more love for this project.

Financing for the $5.2 billion bridge remains a riddle, with sharp, unpopular toll increases likely, and environmental groups are concerned about what will be the biggest dredging project in the history of the Hudson.

But the biggest complaint, one that comes from the executives of three area counties, local mayors and state legislators, and from transportation and planning groups, is that the state is building a second misconceived Tappan Zee by dropping plans to include mass transit as part of the construction.

The Westchester County executive, Rob Astorino, commended the governor for moving the project forward. But he said that a bridge without mass transit would look back to the 1950s instead of to the future. “In an iPad world, an eight-track bridge will be hopelessly obsolete before construction begins,” Mr. Astorino, a Republican, said.

The criticism has irked Mr. Cuomo, whose advocacy helped get the Tappan Zee on a list of 14 projects chosen by the Obama administration last fall for expedited review.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said that the bridge would be built with the potential to add mass transit, and that the decade-long delay and criticism now were emblematic of the inability to build almost any major public works program. More to the point, he said in a phone interview, mass transit could double the project’s cost, and he added that the region could not afford more delays on an unsafe, deteriorating bridge that could cost $1 billion to maintain over the next decade.

“There are a lot of nice ideas out there that you can argue should be done but for the money,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I know, but that’s life.

Photo

The Tappan Zee Bridge carries 138,000 vehicles a day.Credit
The New York Times

“If we only had an additional $5 billion we could do this, but we don’t,” he said, referring to bus service. (Adding rail would cost billions more than that.)

The Tappan Zee carries the New York State Thruway between Rockland and Westchester Counties and has a capacity of 100,000 vehicles a day. It now carries 138,000 and has no shoulders or emergency lanes, so any accident or breakdown can block traffic for miles. The new bridge would meet current seismic standards, while the existing one does not.

The plan is to replace the current seven-lane bridge with either one or two structures projected to have 15 lanes — 8 for traffic, as well as shoulders and breakdown lanes, a lane for pedestrians and bicyclists and space for designated bus lanes. It would be the first major bridge built in the New York City area since the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, in 1964.

Construction could begin by next spring, but crucial deadlines loom in July, when a final environmental impact statement is produced and four consortiums vying to design and build the bridge submit bids. A winner will be selected in September.

Plans developed over the past decade for the new bridge also included public transportation, across a 30-mile corridor focused on bus-only lanes, and possibly also a connection to the Metro-North Railroad.

Just two years ago, the State Transportation Department said, “Mass transit offers the only realistic means of addressing the requirements of improving mobility in the corridor.” Proponents saw the plans as crucial to moving the region toward a future with less sprawl and more mass transit.

But no one came up with concrete proposals on how to pay for mass transit. And Mr. Cuomo said it was not clear whether there would be sufficient ridership to support it.

State officials said that the bridge would provide the crucial piece for a mass transit system that does not now exist and that building a system in stages was always the likeliest approach.

And local business, construction and labor groups and other supporters agree that a new bridge is long overdue and avoiding more delays is far more important than adding transit now. They say the critics represent a minority viewpoint.

“The bridge we’re building is exactly the same bridge we would build if we were simultaneously building the full transit system,” Mr. Cuomo said.

Photo

Crews test the riverbed to see if a new Tappan Zee Bridge can be built next to the old one.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

But critics say that if no money is allocated for mass transit now, there is no reason to think there will be any in the future. Some say the $5 billion bus estimate is inflated.

“We believe a project design so as ‘not to preclude’ transit realistically does have the effect of precluding transit,” the regional chapter of the American Planning Association, which represents 1,200 planners, said in a letter to the state in March.

Numerous other issues must be resolved. The most problematic is how to pay for the project. Charles Komanoff, an economist and policy analyst, said in a report in March that to recover the cost entirely through tolls would require charges of two to four times the current amount, which is $4.75 for passenger cars with E-ZPasses. (The toll is collected in only one direction, from Westchester-bound traffic.)

Political gridlock in Washington is clouding the potential for federal transportation dollars, and the rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the Thruway Authority’s credit outlook this month partly because of the looming Tappan Zee costs.

Mr. Komanoff said a mammoth bridge without transit would create perverse incentives to increase car traffic, with its costs in pollution and carbon emissions.

“The problems of paying off the debt, I think, are going to be so severe they will instill a powerful incentive to generations up and down the Hudson Valley to pump up the traffic levels over the Tappan Zee,” he said.

Environmental groups have claimed that there would be risks to water quality and fish populations from the dredging operation. One well-known group, Riverkeeper, has already threatened to sue, citing environmental threats and insufficient time for the public to review the proposal.

Mr. Cuomo said the slow crawl toward building the bridge should be seen in the context of political, economic and regulatory forces that made almost any major public project exceedingly difficult. He announced an agreement between the Thruway Authority and 14 labor organizations last week on work rules and overtime that he said would save an estimated $452 million.

Mr. Cuomo noted that the Tappan Zee project began three governors ago and that construction had not begun.

“I will prevail in the end,” he said, “but I’m sure it’s going to be a long and difficult journey.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 27, 2012, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Faulting a Plan to Replace The Scorned Tappan Zee. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe